the eric update – day 67: closing in on four pounds. on quickly selecting a pediatrician.

thanks to his low hemoglobin levels and, well, the fact that he is a micropreemie who needs to spend all his energy growing, eric is spending much of his days acting a little listless and sleeping quite a bit. we received the results from his latest blood work and his hemoglobin level is now officially at the same point is was when they gave him his last series of transfusiona. when exactly he’ll get some more blood has become a great conversation topic, and it’s a sneaky way to get a sense for which nurses agree with the neonatologist’s course of action and which don’t. he’s holding out like a champ, although he’s “desatting” more and more, especially when he’s active, which makes feedings an endless series of alarms.

eric is continuing to add weight, thanks in no small part to the fortifier. to put things in perspective, he’s getting about 30 extra calories a day from his fortifier ( about 4 calories per ounce of milk are added ) and that small addition of calories is primarily responsible for his ounce-a-day weight gains. tonight he weighed in at 3 pounds 14.7 ounces or 1777 grams. if he keeps it up, i’ll be much more confident that we’ll be able to celebrate his hitting 4 pounds by his 10 week birthday on sunday.

while it might be boring for you, poor reader, we aren’t quite bored with the fact that eric is doing such a great job taking his bottles. he’s up to three bottle feeds a day, with the remainder being done via a tube that goes straight to his stomach.

when he’s tired, he’ll often feign like he’s not really interested in eating, but we know it’s all a big act and he inevitably drinks his entire bottle in 20 minutes or less. if all goes well, over the next week or so, we’ll be responsible for giving him all his feeds via a bottle, which will be quite exciting, indeed.

after much nagging from the nicu staff, kris and i selected a pediatrician today! we are notorious for taking months to decide on something as simple as a new toaster, so picking a pediatrician could have been something that threw us into months of “analysis paralysis”. that is, if we actually had months to make the decision. but we didn’t, as the nicu nurses have been making it increasingly clear that they needed to start making arrangements with our pediatrician, like, yesterday. so we created a “short list” by asking all the staff who they would take their kids to and correlating the answers with the list of peds doctors in our insurance plan. we then scheduled “meet and greet” appointments and asked a few pointed questions, which led to a surprisingly quick decision.

conflux - a curated confluence of curiousness

i’m not sure how to square these findings with the fact that i’ve long said that in a parallel universe very close to our own i live alone in cabin in the middle of nowhere writing manifestos: “The effect of population density on life satisfaction was therefore more than twice as large for low-IQ individuals than for high-IQ individuals,” they found. And “more intelligent individuals were actually less satisfied with life if they socialized with their friends more frequently.”

the heart warming fable of thanksgiving, unsurprisingly, ends up being a whole lot more complicated than some of us were taught and answers the nagging question of how squanto spoke perfect english when the pilgrims arrived and what was happening during the 100 year interim between columbus and the pilgrims ( spoiler: it involves human trafficking, enslavement and villages being wiped out ). and if you’re a stickler for tradition, you should put ditch the turkey and cranberry sauce for salted pork and olives since the spanyiards were the first to celebrate thanksgiving 50 years before the pilgrims.

“…researchers from a Bosch startup called Deepfield Robotics presented a paper on “Vision-Based High-Speed Manipulation for Robotic Ultra-Precise Weed Control,” which has like four distinct exciting-sounding phrases in it.”IEEE Spectrum

after updating to iOS 9 and el capitan i’ve been having troubles synching photos from my iphone to my macbook air. the mac would recognize the iphone but no photos would show up in the photos application or image capture. it was driving me nuts. turns out, if you have non-apple services like dropbox running that sync your photos to non-icloud services you have to turn them off.

having run a half a dozen marathons, i can’t imagine finishing in 3:05. even more unimaginable in full amish garb so kudos to leroy stolzfus. the whole article is great read but now i want to know more of the backstory on why he started to run: “A few years ago, Stolzfus got “involved with some stuff” he said he shouldn’t have. His brother-in-law suggested he start running instead when he was tempted. He took the suggestion to heart, and went out for a run.”

huh, who knew edward tufte has a farm with 234-acres of landscape sculpture fields that he opens to the public once a year. i’d love to make a trip. and i also love the article’s description of tufte, “[he] is also known as a genius of data visualization, professor emeritus of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale, an author of books on information design, and a hater of PowerPoint.

“The Chagossian people have a word, in their Creole language, for heartbreak: sagren. It is a profound sorrow which refers to the loss of a home, and the impossibility of returning to it. As we build new worlds with our technologies, knitted from fiber-optic light and lines of code, it is incumbent on us to ensure it does not reproduce the erasures and abuses of the old, but properly accounts for the rights and liberties of every one of us.”citizen-ex

“There is no doubt that retail is making a big bet on health care. If it succeeds, the payoff will be enormous. But just as Uber is at war with the taxi industry, retailers will soon be at war with the large, publicly-traded health care chains.”venture beat

wow.“Beginning with this weekend’s NHL All-Star Skills Competition and All-Star Game, the NHL will use GoPro cameras to deliver viewers never-before-seen perspectives of the game.” odin and i would watch this all. day. long. A++

“Our current cultural obsession with food is undeniable. But, while the advent of the foodie may be a 21st century phenomenon, from an evolutionary standpoint, flavor has long helped define who we are as a species, a new book argues.”npr

“Here’s the thing: in order for fees to work, there needs be something worth paying to avoid. That necessitates, at some level, a strategy that can be described as “calculated misery.” Basic service, without fees, must be sufficiently degraded in order to make people want to pay to escape it. And that’s where the suffering begins.”the new yorker